And Do Remember Me Read Free

being beaten by mobs and jailed. The colored folks in Columbus couldn’t stop talking about the Freedom Riders and the whites couldn’t invent curses bad enough for them. The Negro preachers in Columbus said special prayers for them on Sundays and took up collections to help bail them out of jail. The sheriffs of towns and cities across the deep south had sworn to shoot any Freedom Rider, Negro or white, who set foot in their town.
    Jessie had watched this fevered push toward freedom from afar, as though she was a spectator at a play, fascinated by the action on stage, unconvinced of its relevance to her.
    “I bet you been to college,” Jessie said, throwing her arm across the back of the seat, turning so she could just look at Lincoln all the time if she wanted.
    “Yeah, Miles College over in Birmingham.”
    “Then how come you ain’t lookin for a job?”
    “Some things are more important than a job.”
    “Like what?” Jessie asked incredulously. Never in her life had she heard anybody say such a thing.
    “Like the right to vote. Like being able to have the same rights as everybody else,” Lincoln said, his voice urgent, his face animated, turning his glance from the road to look at Jessie as he spoke.
    “You mean white folks?” she asked. “From what I seen, I don’t want to be like them.”
    “No, but I want the same rights they have,” Lincoln said emphatically. “You see what we did in Montgomery with the bus boycott.”
    “Vote gonna git us better jobs?” Jessie asked skeptically, thinking about her mother’s demeaning work as a domestic, her father’s meager salary as a janitor for a funeral home and the need for herself, Willie and Junior and Mae Ann to pick cotton to make extra needed money.
    “That’s what the vote is for,” Lincoln said.
    Jessie leaned forward and turned on the radio.
    “Don’t work,” Lincoln told her. They were nearing Winona. The endless flatness of the land with only an occasional house or store was giving way to small clusters of gas stations and restaurants. The sun was now a deep orange slash across the evening sky.
    “You ever wonder why God made it so hard for us colored?” Jessie asked wistfully.
    “God didn’t do that. White men did.”
    “But you really think we’re good enough?” Jessie pressed him. “For equal rights I mean. You know what they say bout us, that we’re in our rightful place.” Jessie wondered if Lincoln could hear in her voice how many times she had thought that was true, how often she had swallowed it whole, lived on the belief as if it were the bread of life.
    “They’re wrong about us, Jessie. Always been wrong. We’re gonna set the record straight,” he said, squeezing her hands reassuringly as they lay folded in her lap.
    What was she running from? Lincoln wondered. That Jessie was a runaway signaled courage as well as desperation. Her body was firm and mature. He could tell from the condition of her hands, arms and legs that she had worked hard and, of necessity, all her short life. But dimples appeared in her cheeks when she laughed and her eyes were large, clear and honest against the ruddy brown of her face. But those eyes had a furtive edge too, as though they held lethal secrets. Lincoln, who was already beginning to think of himself as a writer, figured secrets made a person more interesting. He knew that everything he saw, touched, learned, felt, would be transformed into words on a page. So what did secrets mean? How could he fear his secrets or anyone else’s when he could change them into anything he imagined or desired.
    The girls he had left behind in Montgomery and Birmingham snubbed him because he was an orphan, or listened politely to his poetry and whispered behind his back that he was queer. Talking to those girls he had everything to prove and everything to lose. But when Lincoln began working with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, SNCC, as it was popularly known, the same girls wanted to